Their revised purpose was now simply to replicate locally the eight revolutionary dramas promoted by Mao’s wife.
But what were Jiang Qin’s own proclivities in entertainment? Would she spend all her time watching her own limited revolutionary creations, over and over? The answer is, “Certainly not!”
While millions of Chinese were forced to watch her handful of morally correct revolutionary dramas year in and year out, Jiang Qin spent a lot of her personal time privately watching western movies like Million Dollar Mermaid (The One Piece Bathing Suit), a 1952 American biopic about an Australian swimming star who created a scandal when her bathing suit was considered to be indecent, The Red Shoes, a 1948 British drama of a young ballet dancer torn between the man she loves and her dream of becoming a prima ballerina, the British action film Deadlier Than the Male, a 1967 James Bond take-off, and the highly innovative 1959 French film Hiroshima, Mon Amore (24 Hour Affair). She adored Greta Garbo so much that she is rumored to have said that she would like to give her an Oscar. Jiang Qin’s excuse for this perk of watching these risqué foreign films was that she could learn skills from the west in order to defeat them.
The great Mao, however, had totally different tastes from his wife in entertainment. He didn’t watch any foreign movies and preferred traditional Chinese operas, all of which were banned by his wife. Secretly, well-known actors would be summoned to perform privately for him. This double life was not just restricted to Mao and Jiang and the top echelons; it was reflected throughout Chinese society in the ordinary people’s attitude and behavior as well. On the top of students’ desks was Mao’s Little Red Book, but underneath the naughty boys were reading Chinese ‘pornographic’ novels such as The Heart of a Young Girl, meticulously copied by hand and spread from student to student under the tables.
Seeing the Countryside
By now the former privileged schools for the high-ranking officials were all disbanded. Xi Jinping and others were relocated to different schools. He was sent to the Middle School No. 25 which was built in 1864 by the American Congregational Church. The school had enjoyed a high reputation in the past and a great number of children with a strong background had studied there, including the son of Deng Xiaoping.
Xi Jinping was certainly not studying much in his new school as the academic curriculum was now in shambles. But to what avail or purpose anyway? All of China’s colleges and universities remained closed down. So even if students remained in high school and suffered through the non-academic curriculum and propaganda barrage, once they finished school they had nowhere to go. These young people had nothing to do in the cities except to cause all kinds of trouble. Hooligans and rival youth gangs were emerging like mushrooms.
Mao didn’t forget these troublesome, urban and privileged youths, especially the children of his mistrusted generals and high-ranking officials that had been relegated to the “Black Gangs”. These youths, just one generation away from their disfavored parents, needed a lesson, and a hard lesson at that. The children of the workers and the peasants were not Mao’s concern any longer. He saw no conspirators there. But for these city youth, Mao had a brilliant idea:
“Youth with education go to the countryside and receive the re-education from the poor and sub-poor peasant. This is very necessary.” Mao Zedong (Dec. 1968)
Mao’s new idea of shipping urban youth off to the impoverished Chinese countryside was soon celebrated and the cause taken up by his followers in the Red Guards. Of course, most of the urban young people were not fully aware of what was awaiting them in the countryside. Nor did they first realize this was a one-way expulsion from the life and family they had always known and fully expected to continue into their secure future.
If the majority of urban young people were naïve enough not to know their fate, their parents certainly were not. Many high-ranking officials in Beijing originally came from the countryside. They knew exactly what the countryside meant, but they had no choice and they could not say a critical word against Mao’s ‘great idea’ for fear of further retribution. Any wrong word could cause a huge catastrophe for their families, as they had witnessed for so many of their comrades. So they packed suitcases quietly and sadly for their children and saw them off like millions of other ordinary families. Privately they cried bitter tears for their children, and the home atmosphere could not be more depressing. This tearing apart of families and fracturing generations on a mass scale was perhaps the worst part of the Cultural Revolution.
When Mao’s new policy of re-educating urban youth in the countryside was released, Xi Jinping had just finished his the third year at the Number 25 Middle School. He had to go. So did his sister. His sister Xi Qiaoqiao was sent to Inner Mongolia to work at a military farm. Xi Jinping was being sent to Shaanxi province. Now the Xi family was splintered into several parts like many families in China, from Shaanxi province to Mongolia, Henan and Beijing. Each person, adult and child, was on his or her own. Mao didn’t just hurt Xi’s family, but all his countrymen for whom family values were so deeply treasured.
The trip to Shaanxi from Beijing lasted more than 24 hours by train, then several more hours by bus to reach the remote village where he was to live. The place he was going to had one of the worst reputations in China for poverty and backwardness. The reason Xi Jinping ‘volunteered’ to go there was because he had relatives in Shaanxi province. His father had a previous marriage, and his father’s former wife, Hao Mingzhu, lived there with his half-brother and another step-daughter, Hao Ping. Potentially he had some tentative connections to rely on in the region, and his mother thought perhaps he might be treated better there than in some place where he didn’t know anybody.
Shaanxi countryside was well known for its poverty and harsh environment. The landscape is surrealistically yellow, being covered by yellow earth. The Yellow River runs through it bringing tons of soil into the ocean and causing perennial flooding and devastating misery as it has done for thousands of years of Chinese history. Today the riverbed of the Yellow River is meters higher than the land along the river and the flooding continues perennially.
The other reason for Shaanxi’s poverty was absolutely man-made. The Cultural Revolution forbade peasants to own anything. No one owned a pig, chicken, or even a vegetable. Any private belongings were regarded as capitalist and anti-revolutionary. Things were only owned communally. The result was disastrous in that the whole countryside could not even provide enough eggs for their own people once state-imposed quotas were met; nobody had tasted a chicken for a decade or more. Xi Jinping soon would see and taste for himself the harsh life thrust upon the peasants.
Fifteen young people from Beijing were due to arrive on the 13th of January 1969. The news made the small village of Liangjia River very excited. The village’s name was sadly ironic as it had no river at all. Only during the summer runoff would some muddy water come rushing down from the hillsides, flooding the whole area.
Early that cold winter morning the whole village dressed up in their best clothes and drove their donkey carts to the commune headquarters to collect Xi Jinping and his mates. There was no private land anymore; all the peasants had been organized into so-called people’s communes. The state was now the landlord.
The peasants were excitedly curious that morning as they had never seen anyone from Beijing, that far-away place of mystery and power, home of The Forbidden City. Everyone was anxious to see what these city people looked like. They had never seen people from Beijing before, and now they were coming to live among them.
Now the bus was coming and pulled up outside the commune headquarters. The peasant families gathered around and waited. Soon the door opened and the passengers started to disembark. To the peasants’ surprise, the young people stepping off the bus looked very white and very young and were very shy compared to the sunburned and weather-beaten faced peasants. When they did speak they spoke perfect Mandarin which the local people
